Payment Processing - Stripe received $685 million in funding last year and is valued at over $20B

Personal Finance - This is a broad market, but we're seeing the "average joe" empowered to make smarter personal finance decisions with companies like Robinhood, Acorns, and Credit Karma. Credit Karma raised $869M and is valued at approximately $4B

Blockchain - While crypto is currently out of favor for many, blockchain is still an exciting prospect. Opendoor is bypassing real estate agents and brokers to disrupt the housing market. Receiving over $1B in funding last year, it is currently valued at $3.7B.

These are the sectors getting the most Fintech funding now (with payment processing the clear leader).

In my opinion, real disruption is brewing in the personal finance & Wall Street sectors ... and funding is ramping up there as we speak.

This Fintech sector reminds me of biotech. Solutions have to be more mature and fully-tested before unleashing them on the public. But winners will Win!

Wall Street is one of the smaller sections in this infographic. Nonetheless, I think you'll be reading a lot more about this space soon. Here are some of the companies worth noting.

Symphony does secure communications for companies like JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs. It helps with internal communication, and client-centric communication, and has various bots and apps to decrease decision time.

Not seen on these lists are all the smaller companies at the beginning of their innovation cycle, and the companies doing their best to stay under the radar. More competitors and more opportunities mean more reason to keep your cards close to your chest.

The funding cycle is always two steps behind the innovation cycle, which means ideas we've been hearing about from the likes of Gartner will be seeing increased publicity soon.

NASA's Mars Opportunity Rover has officially lost contact with earth after a fierce dust storm. Its last message was "My battery is getting low and it's getting dark." The rover's original mission was scheduled for 90 days ... it lasted 14 years.

This week, I spoke on stage at IBM's Think! 2019 conference in San Francisco. Our topic was "Gaining a Financial Edge through Fast Data and Analytics." I think it went well (both the presentation and our exposure to lots of useful technology, talent, and opportunities).

Moscone Center was filled with people clamoring for information about artificial intelligence, big data, and flexible computing (think of it as being able to do what you want locally, in the cloud, or with a hybrid cloud ... or through hardware or software). That means solutions are becoming independent of how they are produced, delivered, or consumed.

February 10, 2019

One thing that Deep Learning excels in is analyzing pictures & videos, and creating facsimiles or combining styles. If you want to create art with deep learning look no further than the Deep Dream Generator or deepart.io which use Convolutional Neural Networks to combine your photo with an art style (if you want to do it on your phone another cool tool to check out is Prisma).

Deepfake is it's exactly what it sounds like ... the use "Deep Learning" to "Fake" a recording. For example, a machine learning technique called a Generative Adversarial Network can be used to superimpose images onto a source video. That is how they made this fun (and disturbing) Deepfake of Jennifer Lawrence and Steve Buscemi.

While this is a fun example, Deepfakes create very real concerns. They're often used for more "nefarious" purposes (e.g., to create fake celebrity or revenge porn and to otherwise make important figures say things they never said). It's likely you've seen videos of Trump or Obama created with this technology. But it is easy to imagine someone faking evidence used at trial, trying to influence business transactions, or using this to support or slander causes in the media.

In 1977, the Voyager 1 launched into space. Just over a dozen years later, the Voyager 1 spacecraft had traveled farther than any spacecraft/probe/human-made anything had gone before. It was approximately 6 billion kilometers away from earth. At that point, the Voyager 1 was "told" by Carl Sagan to turn around and take one last photo of the Earth ... a pale blue dot.

The resulting photo is impressive precisely because it shows so little in so much.

"Every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there--on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam." – Carl Sagan

Earth is in the far right sunbeam – a little below halfway down the image. This image (and the ability to send it back to earth) was the culmination of years of effort, the advancement of technology, and the dreams of mankind.

The resulting speech from Carl Sagan is still profound, moving, and worth a listen.

Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there--on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.

It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.

Today, we have people living in space, posting videos from the ISS, and high-resolution images of space and galaxies near and far.

We take for granted the immense phase shift in technology. You have more computing power in your pocket than we first used to go to the moon.

As humans, we're wired to think locally and linearly. We evolved to live our lives in small groups, to fear outsiders, and to stay in a general region until we die. We're not wired to think about the billions and billions of individuals on our planet, or the rate of technological growth - or the minuteness of that all in regard to the expanse of space.

However, today's reality necessitates we think about the world, our impact, and what's now possible for us.

We created better and faster ways to travel, we've created instantaneous communication networks across vast distances, and we've created megacities. Our tribes have gotten much bigger - and with that, our ability to enact massive change has grown as well.

Space was the first bastion of today's innovation, but today we can look toward A.I., medicine, epigenetics, and more.

It's hard to comprehend the scale of the universe and the scale of our potential ... but that's what makes it worth exploring!

With that said, the next chart surprised me. It shows the number of years it took for various products to gain 50 million users.

Pornhub tracks data like its business depends on it. Well, it is the number one site for pornography. What does that mean? In 2018, over 5,517,700,000 hours of porn was watched on their site. That’s approximately 6,298 centuries of video.

Moreover, last year, it got 33.5 BILLION visits. That’s 1,064 people a second, or 92 million a day. To put that in perspective, that's more people than live in the entire country of Germany.

Here are some additional factoids about its use.

4403 Petabytes of data transferred (574 MB of data for every person on earth)

Consumed more bandwidth than the entire internet in 2002

Stormy Daniels was the number 1 "trend" search in 2018 (followed by Fortnite ...)

January 06, 2019

AI first broke onto the film scene with Metropolis in 1927. "Maria" the evil robot disguising herself as a human played on many human fears; deception, lack of control, and perhaps most importantly being replaced.

Maria represented a future that was bleak and set the foundation for AI in cinema. Since then, there have been approximately 100 movies starring AI.

According to Enlighten Digital, 52% of movies portray AI positively, which means it's about 50/50, and there has been a 144% increase in AI movies since 2010 - so we're becoming more saturated with AI.

According to a study by Cambridge, seeing more films portraying robots (whether positive or negative) is associated with more positive attitudes toward robots. This is in line with the theory that the more exposure one has with "out-group" members (i.e. robots, or people of other races) the more positive one's attitude toward them.

These movies all have different tones but there's a trope that remains common from that initial film in 1927 to films in 2018.

We're always imagining that next step. What's going to happen as AI becomes (in some ways) smarter than us? What's going to happen when our creations surpass our control? What's going to happen if the line between human and robot blurs?

There are a lot of advancements in real-life, in respect to AI. As such, there is a lot of movement on AI ethics, and how to best limit or best enable AI.

In film, we gravitate toward two extremes - utopias and dystopias. In real life, we can recognize those extremes are unlikely ... but the effect of AI is still profound.

We're expanding a technology with the ability to radically change our world - for better or worse - so it's important to keep a purpose-driven approach. We can't lose track of humanity in the pursuit of AI.

Metropolis's final title card (that first AI movie from 1927) still rings true ... "The Mediator Between the Head and the Hands Must Be the Heart"